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Review: Pirate Cinema
Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow My rating: 4 of 5 stars In my Homeland review, I mentioned that many of Doctorow’s novels post-Eastern Standard Tribe are depressing reads; especially Little Brother, Homeland, and For the Win. Since he’s trying to spur people to action by making them realize how the world works, they can be…
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Review: A Midsummer Night’s Steampunk
A Midsummer Night’s Steampunk by Scott E. Tarbet My rating: 5 of 5 stars It’s always tough when people redo Shakespeare. Sometimes it works really well and sometimes it’s just horrible. I absolutely loved the way Scott Tarbet resets a Midsummer Night’s Dream in a Steampunk Victorian England. He was able to use Steampunk to…
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5 Tips for Taking Photos of Toddlers
Every phase of life the children in your life go through presents different sets of challenges. For example, take a look at this photo of Scarlett’s first Easter: She couldn’t sit up and she didn’t have the slightest clue of what was happening. We could try to get her to look at her mom, but…
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Photojojo for Mid April
It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago. I took a long…
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San Francisco Trip Day 1
We flew to San Francisco to attend my brother-in-law’s wedding, but Danielle and I had wanted to go there for years so we decided to have a week-long vacation. Scarlett was amazing on the airplane. It was her second flight in her short life. However, the flight to Florida is so short that if you…
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Mid February Photjojo
An eclectic mix for this photojojo:
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Last.fm Listening Habits 2011 Q4
For the last fourth of the year I continued to listen to my music on random via Amarok’s dynamic playlist. I set it to only play songs that I liked, but other than that left it up to chance. For the most part, the only exceptions were when I had exams to take and wanted…
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Egypt, Israel, and Palestine
With the current revolution in Egypt I’ve been hearing a lot of speculation on NPR’s Talk of the Nation about who will come to power when the current government falls. There’s been a lot of talk about the consequences of a government run by The Muslim Brotherhood. The fact is that some key figured in…
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The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition
As with my discussion of Recettear, playing The Secret of Monkey Island involved revisiting a gaming genre from my past. Unlike Recettear, TSoMI is not a parodic look back at an old genre, it is an original game from that time period. TSoMI is an adventure game, a genre that is pretty much only kept…
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First Look Review: Braid
That a game like Braid can exist is a statement on where video games are as an art form with a well-established history and canon. To make a parallel in the paint world: without a long canon of traditional paintings of tables with fruit and bread, people wouldn’t have really understood the “parody” or “remix”…
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Hawaii Trip and Pictures
During inaugural week I was in Hawaii. Given how cold it was in the Balitmore/DC area that week, I can’t say I wasn’t happy to be there. I stayed at the Embassy Suites Beach Walk in Waikiki and I cannot say enough good things about the hotel. When we first checked in we were offered…
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Just a reminder
As the British (and even some Americans) begin discussing the possibility of racial profiling after this latest foiled airplane terrorism plot, we should remember that not all terrorists are Arabs or Middle-Eastern-looking. Take, for example, the worst terrorist attack in the US prior to the attacks of 11 Sept 2001 – The Oklahoma City Bombing.…
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A little Quickie
I played a civ4 scenario for the first time last night. I played the American Revolution as the British. The map was really neat to play on, as they duplicated the eastern US pretty well. Each side starts out with about half of the cities on the map. Various actions cause loyalists to join the…
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Jewish Reggae
Christian Rock/Pop music has been around since the 1970s when Larry Norman pioneered the genre. Since then it has become a HUGE market encompassing all areas of music from rock to ska to punk to rap. There is a large popuplation of Jews in the US, so why wouldn’t there be Jewish music? Finally, our…